Recent events in a Virginia school system could lead to a new game: Who is the editor?

Over the summer school officials made the principal the editor of student publications and the adviser the co-editor. The school board followed recommendations of the Virginia School Boards Association.

So now for some questions in the game:

Q: What will students learn from this decision?

Q: What will the school community gain from this decision?

Q: What will communities related to the schools learn from this?

Q: What is the justification for such a move.

Q; What country and what era is this, really?

For a more information on this move, go here.

Or, as the SPLC wrote in its Legal Alert to its members, “Unless an outbreak of sanity strikes, student journalism at Fauquier High School officially died July 13 when the school district — without warning or input and, of course, while students were away — adopted its new policy appointing the principal as editor of the school’s newspaper. A newspaper with a principal as editor is a principal’s newspaper, not a student newspaper.”

To read the entire message, become a member of the SPLC.

Seems like a mighty strange game to me. One certainly not educational

“What’s the legal problem you fear the most?” That’s always the first writing assignment for JMC47003, the Teaching High School Journalism class at Kent State. Students are Integrated Language Arts majors….and most would rather die than teach journalism. The class is a requirement, but they see only Shakespeare and poetry in their futures.

So what DOES worry them?

Generally, their topics fall into one of three categories: libel or copyright violation or censorship. If the criteria for worrying is based on statistics, they don’t need to worry about about defamation, but the other two are worth their concern.

Libel cases don’t happen that often, according to the Student Press Law Center. In fact, those that even make it to court are virtually nonexistent when it comes to high school media. Besides, so many red flags could alert students — and advisers — to defamation. Are you saying something BAD about someone? Is it true? Does it say the person did something illegal? Why do readers need to know? That’s an ethical question, but it’s a good one nonetheless.

Copyright violation is pretty easy to combat, too, especially after checking the SPLC Web site. You didn’t take the photo? Do you have written permission to use it? No? Better not. Yes, some items come under the heading of fair use, but that’s not too common, and why not push your own photographers to localize in the first place?

However, censorship and its cousin prior review aren’t so easy to combat. Sure, if you live in one of the “anti-Hazelwood” states, you have legislation on your side. And if you have a board-approved policy setting your media up as a forum of student expression, you have some safety there.

But lately even those protections haven’t been so strong. California schools, with the most long-standing AND most recent free expression legislation, have had some issues. Pennsylvania, with its administrative code, has schools under the gun with administrators naming themselves editors. Districts with strong policies have decided to rethink what’s on the books.

So what’s a current or future adviser to do? Is there reason to worry? Current statistics don’t even give us a good glimpse of how pervasive prior review and censorship are. It’s only when a situation hits the media — the principal pulls an article that might make the school look bad or keeps a stack of papers from being distributed — that we find out what’s going on. Then we know, though we don’t know how much student media is routinely reviewed and how many principals “suggest” some topics never reach their audiences.

The second part of the paper my future teachers write focuses on what they would do about this legal issue, either how they would prevent it or react if it happens. Perhaps the best suggestion to them and to others: Keep current on legal issues. Know what protections your state affords. Train your students to understand their rights and responsibilities and to fight for them if someone tries to take them away. Develop allies on the school board, with parents, in the community.

It’s also valuable to develop a good relationship with administrators, which doesn’t mean letting them call all the shots. Be sure they know the student journalists’ mission and how they work on a regular basis. Let them sit in on a good, rousing editorial board meeting where it’s clear the staff discusses and wrangles over topics and angles and doesn’t just publish without thinking. Trust makes a big difference here.

That’s what most of the students in Teaching High School Journalism decide. Legal battles in traditional English classes are rare. The administration doesn’t call those teachers into the office too often. But does their course content have an impact on the whole school or community? How often do they really make a difference?

Bottom line: Wanting to teach Shakespeare or poetry has its merits. However, teaching journalism and advising student media may have potential legal battles but will definitely have an impact.

What skills will citizens need in a future that requires deciphering information and communicating effectively? How can schools and their attitude towards the use of new and social media make a difference?

As the journalism concepts we teach expand to include new and social media, will our “fourth estate” guidelines maintain a foothold in the new communications “fifth estate”?

Can we trust new media to keep democracy vibrant and vital?

“What Values,” a live and online conference sponsored recently at Kent State University by several groups including The Poynter Institute and Online News Association, raised these and other questions about commercial media.

In one session, Poynter ethics group leader Kelly McBride highlighted recent findings of their Sense-Makers Project: Media credibility is at an all-time low; people feel that bias exists throughout the media and that media fairness and accuracy are at an all-time low. The study also noted trust in the media improves with important stories.

Questions this study raise apply also to scholastic journalism because new and social media are starting to appear in classrooms. Meanwhile, school officials are attempting more than ever to control student expression in new and social media they use outside the schoolhouse gate.

Questions for those of us in scholastic media, based on issues McBride raised, include:

• Do schools fail if they do not help teach students how to evaluate what they hear and see – before they repeat it using newly found social media? Can new and social media help educate students and increase their understanding of media and the communications process?

• How can we help schools embrace the strengths and weaknesses of new media to educate students? Can we avoid shutting down these venues as administrators often do with filters and Internet use?

• Can it be said student journalism/media involve life skills? How can we, as educators, help students effectively disseminate reliable information and question that which is not? Should life skills include “media literacy or crap detecting” as well as information verification?

• Can teaching students to make thoughtful use of social media help define the role journalism plays in a democracy? Will better educated students mean more questioning and aware citizens?

• Should we continue to place value in”objective-based” reporting or re-build the historical model of point-of-view media so readers choose what they want to hear? What does this do to our concept of democracy? Will relying on information people want to hear rebuild trust in media or begin the fracturing of democracy?  Will it re-energize civility? Or…will no one notice?

• What does a lack of trust in the media mean for the role of journalism at the scholastic level? If there is a lack of trust in scholastic media, why does it exist and how can it be fixed?

• How can schools best provide new skill sets for students to better participate in a democracy?

We need to quickly develop answers and approaches to these and other questions to best help our students in a changing media world.

It may not seem like National Punctuation Day has much to do with press rights, but before dismissing it as just a lot of dots and dashes and English-class concerns, think about it for a minute.

First, some background….

Thursday, Sept. 24 is this year’s event, celebrated since 2004 when former newspaperman Jeff Rubin, as his Web site says, started NPD as “a celebration of the lowly comma, correctly used quotes, and other proper uses of periods, semicolons, and the ever-mysterious ellipsis.” (Clearly, even as a newspaperman, Rubin isn’t following AP style, but we’ll ignore that for now.)

The NPD Web site contains teaching tips and games (including how to order a 30-minute instructional video package for $299), photos of incorrectly punctuated signs, links to media coverage and more.

This year, Rubin has been promoting a baking contest  — submit photos of a “cookie, cake, pastry, doughnut, or bread baked in the shape of a punctuation mark,” both going into the oven unbaked and coming out.

But what’s the press rights connection? Credibility. Plain and simple. The more staff members of a publication do right — from quoting the top experts to properly spelling names to printing photos that are in focus  — the more professional they seem. Sure, only the most punctuation-trained English comp teachers will catch the missing fourth “dot” when an ellipsis is at the end of a sentence, but start throwing around apostrophes in the wrong places, and readers will notice.

And once they notice, they start looking for other mistakes and doubting that staff members know what they’re doing. Questioning punctuation moves to questioning content. Questioning moves to reviewing…..just in case there are more mistakes. That’s the slippery slope no one wants on the path.

Perhaps one misplaced comma doesn’t instantly lead to censorship, but when credibility and professionalism can help earn respect and preserve open forum status, it’s worth a careful copyedit to be sure those dots and dashes are where they belong.

Might be worth baking up a batch of commas…, but don’t use them before “and” in a series.

We continue to raise  the question, borrowed partially from a recent ethics workshop at Kent State University: What Values?

What value is there in prior review by anyone outside the student media staff? Even if administrators can claim some sort of legal allowance stating they can, what are the ethical and educational  values indicating they should? Who gains? Who is harmed? What elements of the school mission are fulfilled? How does the action serve truth and accuracy?

Along this line is a relatively new upshot on prior review (maybe not new, but certainly new to this timeframe): The superintendent as publisher; the principal as editor and the adviser as assistant adviser.

The students: certainly not getting a journalism education.

We would again ask: What is the educational value? How does this address the greater good? Who benefits? Who is harmed? What are students learning about the values of a school system that removes them from the process of critical thinking and decision making –  and also puts their teacher and principal in legal harm’s way?

What values – educational or otherwise – are at play?

Speaking of What Values, those teachers interested in lesson plans to address journalism ethics and discussions on online ethics have a free source.

The plans are available for high schools to supplement Kent State-Poynter What Values? workshop Sept. 17. Download materials at the workshop site by scrolling down to the lesson plan button. You can also follow the discussions on online journalism ethics from the workshop.

Today I attended a conference sponsored by my state organization the Washington Journalism Education Association. Students and advisers from all over the state met to listen to speakers and, most important, share ideas and discuss problems. Your state organizations as well as JEA are invaluable sources for advisers.
In your school, you are one of a kind. No one there really understands your situation. However, advisers from other schools do and can help you. In fact they are eager to do so.
Your students can meet other young journalists at these conferences and exchange idea with someone with similar interests and problems. Advisers have the chance to connect with other advisers and get lifelines to people who understand. Believe me, you make lifelong friends as well.
Please make these connections, exchange papers and ideas with other schools and lend your expertise as well as get help from others.
State and national organizations all have web sites with important links to sources of help for you and your students.
Advising is a challenge but you don’t have to meet that challenge alone.
Fern Valentine, MJE

What is your school doing for federally-mandated Constitution Day tomorrow?

Take a little time and use the comments below to give a shout out for  your Constitution Day program.

Let’s show everyone that schools do understand – and practice – the freedoms guaranteed in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

And where schools are taking creative approaches to helping students and their communities the importance of our democratic heritage, be sure to reinforce the effort. In this era of cynicism and incivility, it  is something we need to recognize and appreciate.

One of the law unit test questions in my Teaching High School Journalism course at Kent State goes something like this:

“You want to convince your school principal your students SHOULD have more free expression rights. Explain ONE good argument you could give him or her.” (10 pts.)

My hope is, if they graduate and become journalism teachers, they will be able to do more than jump up on a First Amendment soapbox and rant about their students’ rights under the Constitution. I hope they can do more than cite their own possible state laws or even point out students’ limited rights with the Hazelwood decision.

Although it took me about 25 years, I finally decided those arguments based on law and democracy didn’t go as far as some of the educational ones.

Tell the principal how much students learn when they are allowed to use their own critical thinking skills. Explain how that process is short-circuited when an administrator steps in with demands. Emphasize the chance students have to practice democracy in action under a trained adviser. Reiterate the value of civic engagement. Remind the administrator students learn others will think for them if they don’t get to think for themselves.

That is basically what I expect from my undergraduate education majors when they answer that question on the test.

Now I’m afraid I flunked a real-world test of my own.

I had the opportunity to talk to a school board last night, a group that was considering prior review of a solid, responsible and often award-winning publication. It isn’t a Pacemaker, but it has an adviser with background, one who participates in the state association and takes her kids to workshops. It has editors who care and want to make a difference.

The five local citizens, all male and a variety of ages and backgrounds, didn’t like a story that ran last spring. They thought it might be libelous. (I’m not a lawyer, but I sure couldn’t see that potential, and the SPLC agreed.) They thought it made them look bad. (It was covering a problem in the school….from a variety of angles and with a whole range of sources.) And they worried similar stories in the future — though there had been no problems before last spring — would make it hard to pass levies.

So for three hours, two student editors, then the adviser and I talked to them. I used all those educationally sound reasons and more. I talked about pedagogy and asked them what they wanted their students to learn. Oh, yes, we want them to learn, they said. Oh, yes, education is important. And, yes, they thought the editors were trying to do a good job, and, yes, they thought the adviser was a wonderful person and a great teacher. But….

They don’t have a new policy yet — that will come after more meetings and more discussion. But, bottom line, they want to have control. Period.

And I’m pretty sure I’m not going to get 10 points on that question in the real world.

Along with an article reporting on censorship of a student newspaper at the Orange County School of the Arts, the Orange County Register ran a poll today: Should school administrators have the right to see an advanced copy of a student newspaper?

The Register gave these options:

• Yes, to correct factual errors and discuss concerns about content
• Yes, but only to make sure the paper’s content doesn’t create an imminent danger to students or disrupt campus operations
• No, it’s prior restraint and should never be allowed
• I’m not sure

By midnight Sunday and nearly 1,000 votes after they had posted the poll, the “yes” percentage in favor of having administrators see the paper was 64 percent (273 for the first question and 344 for the second). The no votes were 339 or 35 percent. Ten responders reported not being sure.

And what had brought about the principal withholding the paper (even though administrators said they would release it next week)?

According to the Register, the editor of the student newspaper said her principal was trying to censor controversial but factual information about a new cafeteria services provider. The principal denied stopping the paper was censorship. She said some of the information was inaccurate.

What details sparked the controversy?

In the first story the situation, the Register reported, “The principal said she delayed printing of the 1,500 copies of ‘Evolution’ because of two stories – a front-page story that says the faculty is ‘looking forward to the upcoming school year with an attitude filled with boldness and spiciness’ and a Page 3 story about the school’s new food services vendor.”

The students reported the “vendor identifies itself as a ‘Christian-based company’ whose ‘purpose’ is to serve God.”

California Education Code Section 48907 does not preclude prior review but states student material can only be limited if  it is “obscene, libelous or slanderous” or incites students to “create a clear and present danger” on the campus or “substantial disruption” to school operations.

The Register reports the principal intends to print the paper next week.

“‘I need to hear her rationale,’ the Register quoted the principal as saying, explaining that she felt the religious component was “irrelevant” to the story. “If she has a good reason for putting it in the story, and we still disagree, she gets to publish it as she wrote it.”

The Register quoted several journalism experts who said the principal had gone beyond the limits of state law.

Articles about the incident, in chronological order, can be found, here, here and here. You can also download a PDF of the student paper’s coverage.

Given this scenario, how would you vote?

And… why?

JEA members using the listserv this week were making a list of important scholastic media court cases. That list, or one like it, is on the Court cases page (see link at the top right of this page) – and with links to information about those cases.

We hope you will find these cases and links to them useful We also hope you will suggest other cases and links you found useful.